Cracking the Spine

The Spine of Night (2021) seemed like a big thing in Heavy Metal style animation a couple of years ago. I finally got to se it. It was all right.

It starts with a naked woman warrior (voiced by Lucy Lawless), wearing only a leafy collar, climbs to a giant skull cave and confronts the gaurdian living within (vocied by Richard E. Grant). He is guarding a sacred flower, but lawless has one too. She tells him what brought her to him. She was living peacefully in a swamp, when they are invaded by the neighboring kingdom. Her people is slaughtered and she is taken to the king (voice of Patton Oswald). In the dungeon she meets a young scholar, who recognizes the flowers she wears as a collar. At his instigation, she uses their powers to blast their way out of prison. But the scholar steals the flower and leaves her behind. 

The rest of the movie is variations on the theme - the evil scholar being evil, or the guardian telling tales of the early days of the bloom. It's all very swords-and-sorcery/barbarian-style, with a lot of bloodshed and some nudity. It was fun but I have two major issues:

1. The animation was pretty crude. The motion was largely rotoscoped, so that wasn't the problem. It's just that the basic drawing style was... basic. You wouldn't want most of this on the side of your van, or tattooed on your chest. Just not that epic.
2. The score is just basic cinema music. There clearly should have been a full heavy metal screaming guitars score. I'm sure that thousands of knuckleheads in their garages could have taken care of that no problem. 

Still, it was a fun story, with lots of lore and gore. The story was worthy of the Heavy Metal movie mantel, but not the execution.